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Do you agree with the following statements:
In Golarion, the afterlife is not a matter of faith, it is a certainty. Every intelligent living creature knows that on death it will be judged by its god and then spend eternity (!) either in the equivalent of its heaven or its hell.
Although death is still a bit frightening, because of the pain and possible prolonged suffering that may be involved, it doesn't carry the same psychological fear which death in our own world has. Everything wants to make the most of its "mortal" time, but this is by no means the be-all and end-all of existence. Death is just a transition.
With this in mind, intelligent creatures fight to the death if they believe that:
1) doing so is necessary in order to maintain or improved their standing in their god's eyes,
2) they have spent their lives sufficiently piously that they're prepared to be judged now,
3) failing to fight to the death would significantly decrease their standing in their god's eyes.
What do you think?
Richard
Despite the afterlife being a fact, not every creature would want to die, and not every creature follows a god (forgotten realms had a wall for the false and the faithless). Furthermore, many mortals who have lived their lives to the fullest and upheld their deities ideals would want to be one with their deity. Many evil gods consume the soul of their mortal worshipers or treat them as slaves. And in no description of the afterlife in any D&D game (and by extension, pathfinder) do you remain the same through death. The books often tell of you "becoming one with your god" or "merging with the either" or transforming into an outsider which causes you to lose most/all of your memories, and in a sense, your self. This frightens most creatures.
that being said there are still plenty of intelligent creatures that would fight to the death for many reasons.
Alot of the RL terrorists gladly fight to the death or sacrifice themselves due to their belief of the after life, as did the japanese kamakazis. DnD equivalents, not to mention the 'honorable' death of the knight or warrior that has been defeated would be quite common.
'intelligence' and 'dont kill me' don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Do you agree with the following statements:
In Golarion, the afterlife is not a matter of faith, it is a certainty. Every intelligent living creature knows that on death it will be judged by its god and then spend eternity (!) either in the equivalent of its heaven or its hell.
There is no certainity until you are powerful enough to travel to the Planes and check for yourself, and even then only after you meet someone you knew and can confirm that he died and exist after death. And only if you trust him on this. And forget about hordes of malicious spirits, demons and devil willing to deceive you (which is seriously reducing your survival rate whil on the Outer Planes).
For all others afterlife is no more certain that it was for prehistoric/ancient/medieval folks who knew about afterlife because authoritarian figures told them so. Or even more read them about it from holy books (if it is writen it must be truth!).Still, for some reason many people since the dawn of time were rather unwilling to die and did what they can to avoid dying even despite believing in afterlife, eternal rewards and such...
I've wrestled a bit with the underlying issue, too - why do so many things have such disregard for their lives that they're always fighting to the death against PC groups that obviously outclass them?
The metagame answer if is monsters ever did competent threat assessment, you wouldn't have a game. Everything would run at first sight of the PCs if they're any CR lower than ALP+3, and when they did fight it'd be because it'd probably be a TPK.
I like the above as a story reason why they'd fight on against all hope. FWIW I thought of a secular angle: They don't realise how much trouble they're in until it's too late.
If you assume that you can't identify class levels with knowledge or skill checks, it's reasonable that most monsters and NPCs would presume the PCs look a lot less powerful than they actually are.
A 'normal human' being usually a low level commoner, or warrior or other NPC class of low level, any respectable CR enemy would be overconfident at the start of the fight. By the middle of the fight they could still be attributing the trouble they're having to bad luck, and by the end of the fight still be thinking they still have a chance (or at least that fighting on is thier only chance).
so the party traveling around with the magic carpet, flaming swords and helms of brilliance dont look more intimidating than the commoner with the pitch forks?
Surely, in Golarion, the certainty of the existence of the afterlife follows from the certainty of the existence of the deity.
And the certainty of the latter is manifest from the various powers that clerics wield.
It isn't any more a matter of faith.
Richard
100% a matter of faith, actually.
Faith the cleric is actually a true cleric, and not some mystic/sorceror/wizard/charlatan/bard/witch pretending to be a cleric for his own purposes, nefarious or not. A 10% tithe from a decent sized flock of faithful can add up quickly over a few months, then its off to another congregation.
Faith that the deity is a genuine divine being, not a powerful dragon/aberration/demon lord/archdevil. A fiendish beast could make grand promises of a paradise after death, simply to lure faithful into private confessions to feed on their life force, citing their dwindling health as proof of their sin and need for further confessions.
Faith that the afterlife will be one they want, where they retain their memories and are united with loved ones already past. Rather than dozens of other possibilities, such as reincarnation, eternal servitude, eternal service, absorption, or obliteration.
D&D (and Golarion) afterlives are still a complete matter of faith. To say otherwise is to ignore the inherent nature of man.
so the party traveling around with the magic carpet, flaming swords and helms of brilliance dont look more intimidating than the commoner with the pitch forks?
Truly, I don't believe that is what Asphesteros is saying at all. Rather that in most situations monsters/npc's aren't going to take one look at a party, and realize that there doom is inevitable should they strike out at them. Not every npc walks around with detect magic or the like going, to do so for anyone without PC class levels would be difficult at best.
Also what you have to realize is that most campaign settings don't assume characters in the world higher than 6th-10th level. Now if the big bad is a newley awakened ancient evil or has been leveling up while the party has been trying to uncover their insidious plot then we can assume that epic proportions are taking place within the world. The kinds of things the world only see's once or twice a millennium. In other words most npc's between 6th to 10th level would likely, and rightly believe themselves to be the cream of the crop. Also greater numbers could attribute to their boldness.
Just a few thoughts, AI
i was being snarky
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Even if you had certain knowledge of the afterlife you still might be a bit worried.
Can you be sure that Pharasma will judge you to have led a good life true to your god?
Are you confident that infernal raiders won't kidnap your soul as you await judgement and confine you to an eternity of torment?
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Let's not forget, people martyr themselves in this world on behalf of a god that presumably they require considerably more faith to believe in than the gods of Golarion.
I would have thought in the very least NPCs would sacrifice themselves if failing to do so would be a bad move in their god's eyes.
Richard
Let's not forget, people martyr themselves in this world on behalf of a god that presumably they require considerably more faith to believe in than the gods of Golarion.
I would have thought in the very least NPCs would sacrifice themselves if failing to do so would be a bad move in their god's eyes.
Richard
Ah, but faith and knowledge are different things. If you have FAITH you are often willing to go to any length. But _knowing_ the gods exists changes all that. Now you have to weigh the pros and cons of a given act against everything you know of your god and his standpoints. You might be able to make a spreadsheet or excel-document with points for and against - unless of course you can confess / get absolution, then you would know that you're home free!
...honestly, I think that we cannot fathom a world in where gods exists the way they do in Golarion. Which means you can do one of two things - play it like "the real world" (which is how most things are done, and why we often end up with very silly results when you take a closer look at f.ex. the economy) or you can say; ok, in this world, the gods are real, and therefore this must mean "X".
As there is no official ruling on this from a Golarion perspective (as far as I know?), then it's really up to you - the GM.
It seems to me that all of your three points in the OP are valid - but only if the creatures/persons involved would also believe that they could never later improve (or bring back to status quo) their standing in the eyes of their god. For if they can that - then why go ahead and die now? And if death is trivial and the afterlife ashured, so that you may as well go ahead and die instead of trying to improve on the relationships later - then why don't people kill themselves off when they reach puberty or somewhere around there? Then they can go straight off to the afterlife pure and innocent with out all the problems of adulthood.
...I guess my points is that using real world logic in a fantasy world will most often get you into silly situations.
Actually I think both "faith" and "knowledge" just don't cut it. Fear of death is a primal thing, on a lower level of your psyche than "knowing".
Think of fear of heights. You go across a narrow bridge over a canyon. Now your superior modern brain KNOWS that this is the best bridge ever built and that only 1 in 1000000 people fall off bridges, but still it is very hard to put the first foot on that bridge. You may even have FAITH in the guide that says the bridge is fine, and FAITH in the proud honest builders who made sure every bold is in place, and even Faith in (insert name of deity here) that will take care of you and not let you fall. But boy is it scary.
Now fear of heights is only an aspect of the fear of death. We are programmed biologically to fear death (and things that cause death) and we try to avoid it at all cost. We try our best to stay alive all the time, simply because that is what we are programmed to do.
As thinking beings, we can overcome most of our fears but it is still very difficult. Even the suicide terrorists mentioned are heavily conditioned by their operators before they even consider strapping on explosives. They had strong faith in God even before they joined the terrorist group, but still it takes hard (and cruel) conditioning until they lose their fear of death.
so the party traveling around with the magic carpet, flaming swords and helms of brilliance dont look more intimidating than the commoner with the pitch forks?
Yea PC can look tough, but consider the other side:
The gobins they faced back at first level would crap themselves at such a sight, sure, but by the time the PCs have that kind of gear the major dragons and demons and whatnot they're facing are themselves used to dealing with powerful monsters and supernatual beings, and are used to all the humanoids they come across being powerless against them, so could think, "where the hell did some crappy little humanoid get that stuff? I think it's mine now".
Here's a way to see it in action - flip the standard encounter on its head and see how players react. Throw the group of goblins at those same PCs with the helms and swords, but make the goblins APL+5-6 higher than the PCs (the comparative strength of a 'standard' encounter challenge, just the other way around). Very likly they'll very much underestimate the goblins regardless what they look like, and be in too deep by the time they realise it. I think that's how to imagine why monsters stick in fights they really should be running from.
Do you agree with the following statements:
I do not
In Golarion, the afterlife is not a matter of faith, it is a certainty.
It's not a certainty. Sure, those priests tell us about it, and they can tell us about people who came back, or people who actually visited the outer planes, but that's no different from the guy who knows someone who really saw a dwarf-elf hybrid. Talk is cheap.
Those guys who die and then live again have no recollection of the time they spent dead. The priests say that this is because you're not supposed to know about the stuff after, but what if there is no stuff after? What if they reanimate people by recreating their life energy which was snuffed out completely?
The gods are might be true, but are they actually gods? Do they actually have total control over life and death and what comes before and after? Or are they just outsiders that are powerful enough to make it seem to people that they're "allmighty gods"? I mean, a wizard with enough levels can do some crazy stuff that people without sufficient knowledge about magic will consider miraculous.
It's quite possible that clerics are just insane wizards with some imaginary friends "granting" them magic power. Or maybe they're in on the scam.
All the magic that lets you speak with the Beyond could be a big deception, too. You think you're talking to some dead bloke when you actually talk to a deceiving trickster god who gets a huge kick out of this. And the bodily travel to those places can be a big psycho trip, too.
All this is from the perspective of an in-game agnostic. Sure, we, the RPG players and GMs who exist outside of the game world and have absolute power and knowledge over the it know for a fact that the gods are real and people really go to heaven (or one of many other ultimate destinations) when they die, but the people in that world don't have that sort of certainty.
It remains a matter of faith.
Every intelligent living creature knows that on death it will be judged by its god and then spend eternity (!) either in the equivalent of its heaven or its hell.
They believe in that (see above). Plus, you mention something very important: The being judged part. Being killed in this fight might be worse than "just" dying. It could mean that your deity measures you and finds you wanting, casting you into a hell of eternal torment because your efforts were insufficient. Eternal is quite a long time...
Although death is still a bit frightening, because of the pain and possible prolonged suffering that may be involved, it doesn't carry the same psychological fear which death in our own world has. Everything wants to make the most of its "mortal" time, but this is by no means the be-all and end-all of existence. Death is just a transition.
You do know that many people in this world also believe that death is not the end, but only a transition. (Is it a funny coincidence that I'm listening to Beyond This Life while I'm writing this?).
While many think they're certain of what happens at death, nobody can actually, really know. Nobody has the facts. It's a matter of faith.
Call it ironic, but we're in a position very similar to the Golarion dwellers': We're part of this world, not beyond it. We aren't told all the rules. We can't really change the rules.
With this in mind, intelligent creatures fight to the death if they believe that:1) doing so is necessary in order to maintain or improved their standing in their god's eyes,
2) they have spent their lives sufficiently piously that they're prepared to be judged now,
3) failing to fight to the death would significantly decrease their standing in their god's eyes.
What do you think?
I think that this is very common behaviour. In our own world.
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Is it me, or does the OP argument sound a lot like that conversation Roy had with his girlfriend in OotS..? Just sayin'... ;)
Golarion has some interesting setting-specific deity-weirdness: there's all that stuff about the Test of the Starstone and normal (not to mention drunk as a lord) mortals becoming gods (accidentally even!); there's gods being (apparantly permanently) killed; there's an apparant god ruling a country on the mundane plane... all sorts of stuff.
Some characters may take all that as 'proof' that the 'gods' exist. Some may just take it as 'proof' that the 'gods' are just more powerful 'guys'. Your average downtrodden peasant probably just thinks it's the way stuff is and, as always, the working man is at the bottom of the whole rotten heap (and is more concerned about what the weather is doing to this year's turnip crop in any case)... it's not like the average 1sp a day wage is going to let most people ever experience any of that juicy magic (divine or otherwise) for themselves...
Of course, those who do follow the gods (for fun and prophet...) generally have a bunch of stuff that their god wants them to be doing / promoting / not doing (at least, that's what the clerics say... and it's their job to know that stuff, right... right?): getting yourself murdered is probably going to put a cramp in that doing / promoting cycle (although it may help the not-doing part... 'Thou shalt not... oh... you're dead... you know, just forget the whole thing... seems kinda', I don't know, irrelevant now?').
Generally it'll only be those adventurers who have scads and scads of spare ca$h to pay for (convieniently available anywhere, or so it sometimes seems) Raise Dead spells and the like that will see death as a mere speed bump... and even then, it sometimes annoys them... ;)
IMHO, natch!